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Roselle Lim on Finding Joy During Instability
Roselle Lim is the author of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune and Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop. She is featured in A Celebration of Food In Asian American Literature and in an upcoming Books Connect Us podcast episode.
Toronto, 2003.
What started as whispers through the family gossip network—flu, but worse, coming from Hong Kong—had spread across the city: The Chinese, they brought it. Those tourists; those immigrants.
I was in my third year at York University when SARS arrived in Toronto. A decade earlier, my family had immigrated from Manila to Scarborough. We shopped at T&T, ate at Sam Woo BBQ, and browsed the tiny glass shops within Pacific Mall.
But, when people are afraid, the facade of civility cracks.
Grown men, faces red, would scream at me, slurs spewing from their mouths, on my walk home, the kindest being: Go back to China. Anyone who looked like me became the city’s rage receptacle. Prejudice was easier to adopt and justify when rationalized by fear.
The virus was all anyone talked about. There was no escape. It dominated every published newspaper, blared from every radio station, and played twenty-four hours a day on every cable news channel.
My mother became obsessed, and soon started having chest pains and shortness of breath. She was convinced she had contracted the virus.
We took her to nearby Scarborough Grace Hospital. The waiting room was full of Chinese men and women. Murmurs of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, and Hakka hung heavy in the air, weighed down by worry, fear, and uncertainty. No one smiled. They had the same panicked eyes of my mother.
Thankfully, Mama was cleared, yet her symptoms persisted—diagnosed as hypochondria. Every demand to return to the hospital increased her risk of a genuine infection. It was a constant battle that tested our family—only I sat with her, listened to her, and tried to dissuade her from going back to the hospital. One didn’t need to be infected to be forever changed.
Toronto contained the viral outbreak and life returned to normal. We healed slowly. I thought it was a singular experience.
SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19, 2020.
I don’t want to go out. Even though I know it’s safer to do so, I debate wearing a mask in public—would I be less of a target, or more? The painful memories, repressed and buried, rush back to the surface, injuring anew.
This is so much worse than SARS, but also, sadly, so familiar. A whole group of people are—again—made the scapegoat.
After that spring of SARS, I got married, moved from Toronto to a rural community of three thousand people, and gave birth to a daughter. As one of only three Asian women in town, I’m hardly invisible, yet the coronavirus has stripped away all anonymity. The overt racism I dealt with in 2003 is missing, but it boils under the surface, with micro-aggressions during every interaction. Having lived this already, I recognize and accept that I will be scarred again.
Stories of hope and delight are a salve for today’s chaos and instability.
And yet, while much remains the same, much has changed in twenty years. People ask if you’re okay and listen with empathy. Neighbors, maybe for the first time, reach out to see how they can help. We do grocery runs for the elderly within the community. It’s not all perfect. We must not ignore the problems, but nor should we gloss over the kindness.
As flight attendants used to remind us, “put your oxygen mask on first.” You must take care of yourself before you can take care of others. Therefore, find joy and comfort, and feel no guilt in that joy, in that comfort.
Escape into a book. Remind yourself that good existed and continues to exist. Stories of hope and delight are a salve for today’s chaos and instability.
Through books, we can travel, while remaining sheltered. We can eat, without taking a bite. We can watch, while social distancing. We can forget everything outside, if only for a while.
A few book recommendations:
When I need a steamy romance, I turn to Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient and The Bride Test.
For levity and fluff, Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy.
For mystery, Jennifer Chow’s Mimi Lee Gets a Clue.
For fantasy, Traci Chee’s the Reader Trilogy, Julie Dao’s Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, Elizabeth Lim’s Blood of Stars series, and Kat Cho’s Wicked Fox.
For cookbooks and memoirs, David Chang’s Eat a Peach and Ali Wong’s Dear Girls.
For middle grade, Mae Respicio’s Any Day with You, Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Mermaid, The Witch, and the Sea.
